Music is the one of the most magnificent creations of the human race. Music is expressed in complex forms, syntaxes, colors and articulations that are rooted both in the human biology and elegant mathematics.
Learning, composing, accessing and playing music are among the most fundamental human activities. Other than being an art form practiced by professional musicians and enjoyed by almost everyone else in the world, numerous studies have shown that music is greatly beneficial to the cognitive development of children.
Because of the advancement in technology over the last century, there is now little barrier for accessing and enjoying music. Music is performed in concert halls and recording studios; performance is recorded, stored and disseminated via a great variety of formats and channels. Consequently, almost any music is available at any time in any place to anyone with reasonable access.
Nonetheless, despite such technological advancement over the last century, there is still plenty of improvement potential for assisting learning and composing music by both professionals and novices, by the very senior and the very young, including as young as 2 to 3 years of age when the children have already developed an interest in music.
We see three major barriers to learning and composing music.
1. Skill required. The most commonly practiced format of learning music is the learning of a particular musical instrument. For example, parents often engage piano teachers to teach their children piano, while musicians play the piano to compose musical notes. Needless to say, it takes years of vigorous practice to become good at playing piano at the amateur level, a process quite often forced upon the children by the parents which costs time, money and possibly the children's very interest in music. It takes tremendous practice and sacrifice to become a pianist.
2. Tools available. Being good at one musical instrument does not readily give one the ability to compose a music piece, with the full range of tunes and rhythms. For example, being good at piano does not readily enable someone to compose music with the drum, the trumpet, or the violin. The popular software program GarageBand by Apple Inc. allows the user to create music with elements of percussion, wind and string instruments; however, the functionality in GarageBand relating to the construction of original music leaves much to be desired.
3. Music syntax. The syntax of music is highly complex. Terms such as chord, diatonic chord, accidental, major and minor and their many types, variations, equivalency and inversions are simply beyond the grasp of most children and the vast majority of the people who are not professional musicians and have not learned the intricacies of music theories. While anyone can “create music” by singing into a microphone or hitting a few keys on the electronic piano, without the precise language of music syntax, such rudimentary recording cannot be precisely described, nor can it be dissected, analyzed, or further improved upon.
We therefore see the need to create a system that greatly reduces the skills required for learning and creating music, that makes the entire range of musical instruments easily available, and that allows sophisticated structure and complex syntax to be created based more on one's appreciation and imagination in music and less on one's mastery of the music syntax.